Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hossein Salami blasted the “Israeli” prime minister for fabricating the realities on the ground and promoting Iranophobia, and said that Benjamin Netanyahu will take his dreams to grave.

“Netanyahu should know that there is no way for him except fleeing the region and so he needs to learn how to swim in the Mediterranean Sea,” General Salami said on Friday, addressing a group of IRGC commanders and officers in the city of Isfahan in Central Iran.

He underlined that the enemy was planning to create a new Middle East led by the “Israeli” regime, but all their dreams turned sour.

“The US says it has spent some $7 trillion in funding wars across the region, but with the will of God and resistance of nations, it has not been able to gain anything from it and has faced defeat,” Salami added.

“Israel” is estimated to have 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. The regime, however, refuses to either accept or deny having the weapons.

It has also evaded signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in flagrant violation of a UN Security Council resolution amid staunch endeavor by the United States and other Western states on international levels in favor of its non-commitment to the accord.

Iran has repeatedly announced that its nuclear program is merely for peaceful purposes and poses no threat to the international peace and security. Iran’s nuclear facilities have been under the constant monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency for the last two decades. But a nuclear accord signed by Iran and six world powers in 2015 placed the country under even stricter rules of supervision and inspection.

Yet, the UN nuclear watchdog has underlined in 12 reports under the deal as well as dozens of more reports prior to the endorsement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that there has never been any anomaly at Iran’s nuclear program to indicate a move or drive towards a military nuclear capability, reasserting that the country’s nuclear program has remained strictly loyal to its stated “peaceful purposes”.

Back in June, the Iranian foreign minister decried the “Israeli” entity’s nukes as a real threat to the Middle East region and the rest of the world, calling for a new focus on the occupying regime’s nuclear arsenal.

Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif posted a message on his official Twitter account, saying although Iran had no nuclear weapons, the entity, which is the sole Middle Eastern country to possess such weapons, continued to “howl” about “fabricated” Iranian “ambitions”.

Last May, in response to numerous times Netanyahu falsely accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, notably his latest Big Lie at that time, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesmanBahram Qassemi slammed him strongly, saying:

He’s a “broke and infamous liar who has had nothing to offer except lies and deceits,” adding:

“Netanyahu and the notorious, child-killing Zionist regime must have reached the basic understanding that the people of the world have enough awareness and cognizance.”

He long ago lost credibility. Many Israelis despise him, venting their anger in occasional large-scale street protests against him remaining prime minister.

His shameful accusations against Iran are never supported by credible evidence because there is none.

Its legitimate nuclear program has no nuclear component. It’s combatting terrorism, not supporting or proliferating it.

It neither threatens or attacks other nations like Washington, NATO and Israel do repeatedly.

Qassemi called Israel an “illegal regime…using battered charlatanism of the ignorance age, (mindless) of world public opinion.”

In response to Netanyahu’s false claim about a “secret atomic warehouse” in his UN General Assembly address, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano refuted the accusation, saying:

“The agency sends inspectors to sites and locations only when needed. The agency uses all safeguards relevant to information available to it but it does not take (so-called intelligence) at face value.”

Without mentioning Israel or Netanyahu by name, Amano added that “(a)ll information obtained, including from third parties, is subject to rigorous review and assessed together with other available information to arrive at an independent assessment based on the agency’s own expertise.”

“In order to maintain credibility, the agency’s independence in relation to the implementation of verification activities is of paramount importance.”

Since Security Council Resolution 2231 made the JCPOA nuclear deal binding international (and US constitutional law under its Supremacy Clause), Washington alone breached it – straightaway by Obama, notably by Trump’s unlawful pullout.

The IAEA affirmed Iran’s full compliance with JCPOA provisions 12 consecutive times. No nation is more intensively monitored, none more scrupulously in compliance with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provisions and its other nuclear obligations.

US use of radiological material in war theaters, along with deploying nukes in Europe and elsewhere flagrantly violate NPT’s letter and spirit.

Moscow slammed its “joint nuclear missions” with NATO imperial allies, saying “this is a direct violation of (NPT) Articles I and II…”

It expressly prohibits transfer of nuclear weapons from one nation to another.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Turkey currently host 150 US nukes at six bases.

B61 nukes are the Pentagon’s oldest in its arsenal, in 2020 to be replaced by B61-12 bombs, costing over $10 billion, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation.

Moscow’s complaint to Washington about illegally deploying nukes was ignored.

“The provisions of our military doctrine concerning the use of nuclear weapons are deliberately distorted.”

“The western public is being continuously told that Russia appears to review its stance on the place and the role of the nuclear weapons and focuses more and more on that. This does not correspond to the reality.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a notorious warmonger, serial liar and supremacist racialist who used to lead the closest thing Israel has to a fascist party until parties even more extreme got elected to parliament, is attempting to bamboozle the clueless Trump into getting on a war footing with Iran.

Netanyahu’s breathless announcement that there was a potential weapons aspect to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been known for a decade and a half.

Netanyahu even seems to have provoked the White House to issue a communique falsely stating that Iran has a weapons program presently, which it promptly had to retract. The incident is so scary because it shows how easy it is to manipulate the erratic Trump and his not-ready-for-prime-time staff. That sort of thing, David Frum said on Twitter, can cause a war. And he should know.

But the retraction is incorrect, as well. Iran in the distant past had done some things that would be helpful if it had launched a full blown weapons program. It never did launch such a program.

Netanyahu instanced no evidence at all that Iran is out of compliance with the 2015 deal, and UN inspectors continually have affirmed that Tehran *is* in compliance. His allegation that Iran’s recent missiles are designed to be fitted with warheads is simply false.

So why try to put Iran on the front burner of American war-making? It is a desperate attempt on Netanyahu’s part to divert world attention from the ongoing Israeli Apartheid discrimination against the stateless Palestinians, which it militarily occupies (directly with jackboots and colonial settlers on the West Bank, indirectly with military encirclement and the sniping of innocent protesters in Gaza).

In recent weeks, Israeli snipers have used live ammunition to kill some 40 and wound hundreds of Palestinians who were unarmed and peacefully protesting their imprisonment in the Gaza Strip (70% of their families were kicked out of their homes in Israel and now live in squalid refugee camps while European Israelis took over their houses and farmland and are living it up). The sniping victims have including children, journalists, demonstrators distant from the Israeli confinement fence, and worshipers at prayer with the mention of God on their lips. Shooting unarmed people who pose no threat is a war crime, and doing it systematically amounts to a crime against humanity. So too is the crime of Apartheid described in the Statute of Rome as a “crime against humanity,” and Israel manifestly and robustly practices Apartheid against the Palestinians under its military heel.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program (to make fuel for reactors generating electricity) was designed to prevent Iran from weaponizing the program.

All nuclear enrichment via centrifuges is potentially dual use. Uranium can be enriched to 5% for reactor fuel, but if scientists keep feeding it through the centrifuges they can enrich it to 95% for a bomb. The Iran deal was designed to keep Iran from making high enriched uranium (HEU).

Iran accepted spot inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. No country under active inspections has ever developed a nuclear weapon.

Iran vastly reduced the number of centrifuges it has, which means it would take at least a year or even years to make HEU, even if it could do so without the inspectors detecting the signature at the site, which it cannot.

Iran discontinued and bricked in its planned heavy water reactor at Arak. Fissile material builds up on the rods in a heavy water reactor much faster than on a light water reactor, and so the heavy water ones can theoretically aid in making a bomb. Iran no longer even has a plan for a heavy water reactor.

Iran destroyed its stockpile of uranium enriched to 19.5% for its medical reactor. It has no enriched uranium higher than 5%, useful for its three reactors at Bushehr. Iran benefits from nuclear energy because it burns oil for electricity generation, cutting into the money it could make from instead selling it on the open market.

South Korea, Japan and France all use nuclear reactors for electricity generation just as Iran is starting to. France enriches uranium both for that purpose and to make nuclear weapons. If you don’t think Japan could construct a bomb in three weeks if it wanted to, you don’t know Japanese technology (they have a big stockpile of plutonium).

So Netanyahu and the American Right should have sighed in relief, right? Remember, Netanyahu has several hundred actual real nuclear bombs that it could drop on Iran, and Iran has bupkes. Likewise the US is bristling with nuclear warheads. Iran has some old F4 jets Nixon gave them.

In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate of the CIA assessed that Iran did some experiments with military significance in 2003 but then halted them ever after. The 2011 NIE repeated the conclusion that Iran did not have a weapons program at that time and had not decided to pursue one.

Our sloppy and sometimes propagandistic press keeps talking about Iran’s “nuclear weapons program,” but it is a unicorn. No such thing has ever existed per se, though the experiments and programs Iran pursued as part of its civilian energy program always had potential weapons implications, and Iranian scientists did perform some occasional experiments that might have had weapons purposes.

Because nuclear enrichment is dual use, Iran until 2015 always had the option of going for broke and pursuing a bomb, using know-how gained from the civilian program. That is all the CIA was saying. It was also saying that no such decision had been taken, a conclusion echoed by Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak and by Israeli intelligence.

But the JCPOA forestalled any such decision. Iran could only make a bomb now by kicking out the inspectors and manufacturing thousands of centrifuges, in other words by putting up a huge neon sign saying “I am making a nuclear bomb here.”

Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has also always probably been intended to have deterrent effects against anyone thinking of doing to the country what Bush did to Iraq. I.e. if it was clear someone was planning to invade, Iran could in fact go for broke and try to defend itself.

Since the US right wing and the government of Israel would very much like to see Iran invaded and its government overthrown, and its legs broken, this nuclear latency or the Japan option is an annoyance they would like to remove. It is easier to execute someone if you disarm him first.

But Iran of course is already substantially disarmed, voluntarily. What is going on now is an attempt to pull the wool over people’s eyes about that and to con them into spending $6 trillion on another ruinous Middle East conflict.

That will keep everybody busy while Netanyahu finally succeeds in ethnically cleansing what is left of the Palestinians, his ulterior ultimate goal.

*

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment and Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

The Zionist media outlets commented on the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech which tacked the Iranian nuclear program, criticizing the lack of proofs and highlighting the political motives behind it.

Maariv newspaper stressed that Netanyahu is dragging all the Zionists into war due to the collapse of his policies in Syria over the past seven years, not because of the Iranian role in that country.

The Israeli paper added that the campaign against the Iranian nuclear program also failed as the Islamic Republic has gained more international legitimacy and approval from Europe, China, Russia and most of the world countries.

For its part, Haaretz newspaper noted that Netanyahu’s speech lacked the clear proofs which confirm the militarization of the Iranian nuclear program, adding that the unpredictable escalation which will result from revoking the pact will turn the Zionist entity into a ‘boxing bag’.

Yediot Ahronot quoted the former head of the Israeli ‘National’ Security Council, Uzi Arad, as saying that Netanyahu’s speech did not provide new and realistic information and that there has not been any proof which indicates Iran’s violation of the nuclear pact.

The EU foreign policy chief says what the Israeli premier tried to present as documents on Iran’s “secret” nuclear work fails to question Tehran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, and that any such claims should solely be assessed by the UN nuclear watchdog.

“What I have seen from the first reports is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has not put into question Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) commitments, meaning post-2015 nuclear commitments,” Federica Mogherini said Monday.

The remarks came hours after Netanyahu unveiled what he claimed to be “conclusive proof of the secret” Iranian nuclear program during a televised address from Israel’s ministry for military affairs.

Standing in front of a big screen and using large visual aids, the prime minister claimed that “Iran is brazenly lying” about its nuclear activities, presenting 55,000 pages of documents and 55,000 files on CDs as alleged evidence.

Netanyahu’s new anti-Iran show comes only ahead of a May 12 deadline for US President Donald Trump to decide whether Washington would keep its side of the multilateral deal with Iran. Trump has given the European parties to the JCPOA until that date to fix the so-called “flaws” in the accord or face a US exit.

The Israeli leader’s fresh claims contradict numerous reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verifying Iran’s full commitment to its side of the bargain.

Mogherini further said the JCPOA “is not based on assumptions of good faith or trust – it is based on concrete commitments, verification mechanisms and a very strict monitoring of facts, done by the IAEA. The IAEA has published 10 reports, certifying that Iran has fully complied with its commitments.”

“And in any case, if any party and if any country has information of non-compliance, of any kind, it can and should address and channel this information to the proper, legitimate, recognized mechanisms, the IAEA and the Joint Commission [of the JCPOA] for the monitoring of the nuclear deal that I chair and that I convened just a couple of months ago. We have mechanisms in place to address eventual concerns,” she said.

The top EU diplomat further reiterated that she had not seen from “Netanyahu arguments for the moment on non-compliance, meaning violation by Iran of its nuclear commitments under the deal.”

UK, Germany defend Iran deal

Following Netanyahu’s show, a British government spokesman defended the Iran nuclear pact, saying the IAEA inspection regime “is one of the most extensive and robust in the history of international nuclear accords.”

“It remains a vitally important way of independently verifying that Iran is adhering to the deal and that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful,” he said in a statement.

Furthermore, a German government spokesman said Berlin will analyze the Israeli documents on Iran’s nuclear program, but independent inspections must be maintained.

He emphasized that “the nuclear accord was signed in 2015, including the implementation of an unprecedented, thorough and robust surveillance system by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Israeli data ‘mostly recycled material’

Meanwhile, a former deputy director for sanctions at the US State Department said he had not seen anything in Netanyahu’s presentation that would change the accord, BBC reported.

“I think, frankly, this was a political statement meant to try to influence President Trump’s decision on whether to pull out of the deal,” John Hughes said, noting, “I think it’s mostly recycled material.”

A resolution calling for the inspection of Israeli nuclear sites has been defeated at the IAEA General Conference, with Tel Aviv, which led an intensive campaign against the Arab states’ proposal, hailing the result of the vote as a “great victory” in the international arena.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Conference voted 61-43 against the resolution put forward by Egypt and backed by Turkey, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Iraq, as well as Russia, China. And South Africa.

The resolution called for the international monitoring of the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona which is suspected of developing fissile material for Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal that poses “a permanent threat to peace and security in the region.”

Israel’s long term allies such as the US, some EU members, Australia, Japan South Korea and Canada voted against the motion calling for nuclear inspection. Tel Aviv and pro-Israel states worked endlessly behind the scenes to sway the votes in Israel’s favor on the subject of “Israel’s nuclear capabilities” ahead of the IAEA vote.

“I personally talked with more than 30 presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers,” Netanyahu revealed. “In our conversations I explained that there’s no place for a discussion of this sort while the main problem in the Middle East remains Iran’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons and its clear declarations of its intent to destroy the State of Israel.”

Since Iran has sealed an agreement with the world powers on greater nuclear transparency, this vote became the first attempt to press Israel to follow suit. However, similar proposals submitted nearly annually have been easily thwarted in the past.

Thursday’s vote was hailed by the Netanyahu’s office as a “great victory for Israel on the international arena.” A great victory indeed, as a similar resolution last year was rejected by 58 votes to 45,with 27 countries abstaining. This year the margin tilted in Israel’s favor, with Netanyahu “welcoming” that gap in favor of Israel.

Israel, which de jure has no nuclear capabilities, remains the only Middle Eastern country outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – a notion which the Arab states have been pushing to change.

“This [Israeli] regime is continuing to advance and develop its nuclear program contrary to all international norms,” the Iranian envoy said of the resolution, according to Haaretz. He said that Iran and other countries are “worried about the negative ramifications” that Tel Aviv’s alleged nuclear program has on the Middle East.

The Syrian envoy prior to the vote said that the international community must demand Israel to “dismantle all of its nuclear arsenal”.

Israel is widely believed to possess dozens of nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear warheads in the megaton range. Tel Aviv however has never confirmed or denied being in possession of nuclear arms.

A resolution calling for the inspection of Israeli nuclear sites has been defeated at the IAEA General Conference, with Tel Aviv, which led an intensive campaign against the Arab states’ proposal, hailing the result of the vote as a “great victory” in the international arena.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Conference voted 61-43 against the resolution put forward by Egypt and backed by Turkey, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Iraq, as well as Russia, China. And South Africa.

The resolution called for the international monitoring of the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona which is suspected of developing fissile material for Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal that poses “a permanent threat to peace and security in the region.”

Israel’s long term allies such as the US, some EU members, Australia, Japan South Korea and Canada voted against the motion calling for nuclear inspection. Tel Aviv and pro-Israel states worked endlessly behind the scenes to sway the votes in Israel’s favor on the subject of “Israel’s nuclear capabilities” ahead of the IAEA vote.

“I personally talked with more than 30 presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers,” Netanyahu revealed. “In our conversations I explained that there’s no place for a discussion of this sort while the main problem in the Middle East remains Iran’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons and its clear declarations of its intent to destroy the State of Israel.”

Since Iran has sealed an agreement with the world powers on greater nuclear transparency, this vote became the first attempt to press Israel to follow suit. However, similar proposals submitted nearly annually have been easily thwarted in the past.

Thursday’s vote was hailed by the Netanyahu’s office as a “great victory for Israel on the international arena.” A great victory indeed, as a similar resolution last year was rejected by 58 votes to 45,with 27 countries abstaining. This year the margin tilted in Israel’s favor, with Netanyahu “welcoming” that gap in favor of Israel.

Israel, which de jure has no nuclear capabilities, remains the only Middle Eastern country outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – a notion which the Arab states have been pushing to change.

“This [Israeli] regime is continuing to advance and develop its nuclear program contrary to all international norms,” the Iranian envoy said of the resolution, according to Haaretz. He said that Iran and other countries are “worried about the negative ramifications” that Tel Aviv’s alleged nuclear program has on the Middle East.

The Syrian envoy prior to the vote said that the international community must demand Israel to “dismantle all of its nuclear arsenal”.

Israel is widely believed to possess dozens of nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear warheads in the megaton range. Tel Aviv however has never confirmed or denied being in possession of nuclear arms.